Satellite Photos Dismissed in POW Hunt : Vietnam War: Defense analyst says none of pictures indicate U.S. prisoners were left behind. GOP senators are angered.

A senior Defense Department official drew angry fire from Republican senators Thursday when he testified that none of the satellite pictures taken over the years indicate that U.S. prisoners were left behind in Indochina at the end of the Vietnam War.

Nearly all photographs purporting to reveal symbols made by POWs actually show only “shadows, vegetation or artifacts,” while the only two images that clearly show man-made symbols are of dubious origin, said Assistant Secretary of Defense Duane Andrews.

“It’s easy to be misled. . . ,” Andrews told a Senate committee that is investigating the fate of American servicemen still listed as missing in Southeast Asia. “When viewing an image, it is often easy to ‘see’ things in nature that appear to be man-made but which on closer examination are shadows and foliage.”

That explanation drew immediate protests from two Republicans on the panel, committee vice chairman Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire and Charles E. Grassley of Iowa. Both questioned the Pentagon’s competence in analyzing satellite imagery and its motives for seeking to debunk what both men assert is growing evidence suggesting that at least some servicemen remained in captivity as late as 1988.

Grassley complained that the Defense Intelligence Agency, the Pentagon division responsible for accounting for the missing, has been so determined to disprove that POWs could have been left behind in Vietnam or Laos that it has treated live sighting reports, satellite imagery and other sources of information about them “like they were UFO reports.”

Smith, a POW activist who has long maintained that prisoners were left behind in 1973, went further, accusing Andrews of giving sworn testimony that was “deceiving . . . , dishonest . . . and downright misleading.”

There is a “real probability that some American prisoners of war have been held long after the 1973 cease-fire agreement with Vietnam and long after our government said there was no evidence anyone was still alive,” Smith said. The Pentagon knows this, he said, but is trying to hide “the truth from the American people.”

The emotionally charged assertions brought a rebuke from Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.), who asked senators to avoid getting “everybody hyped up over imaginary symbols.”

Andrews and a panel of DIA intelligence experts testified that only two sets of symbols picked up by satellites over Southeast Asia were undeniably man-made.

One photograph appears to show the year 1973 and the letters “TH” on the Plain of Jars in Laos in May and July of 1973. The other, taken in January, 1988, showed the letters “USA” clearly stamped in a rice paddy near Sam Neua in northeast Laos, along with a less well defined intersection of lines that appear to form the letter “K”--a distress code used by pilots to signal their presence on the ground.

But while Andrews conceded that both sets of symbols were “clearly intended to communicate something to an observer from above,” he said their significance remains doubtful. He said the “1973 TH” symbol does not correspond to any known distress code or the name of any serviceman reported missing in that area of Laos.

Another expert, William Gadoury, a Pentagon field investigator who has spent months in Laos searching for evidence, sought to debunk the “USA” symbol at Sam Neua, alluding to the DIA’s belief that it was a hoax perpetrated by one of the POW-MIA activist groups that collect contributions from the families of the 2,226 servicemen still officially listed as missing in the Vietnam War.